


With Death Comes the Morning (unannounced and new)

by seraphim_grace



Category: Blade (Movie Series), Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Gen, Vampires, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies, black widow being awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 11:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5625154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphim_grace/pseuds/seraphim_grace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years after the virus is released Natasha tries to make her way to Westchester</p><p>set in 1996</p><p>features prolonged scenes of horror</p><p>has some discussion of mental illness that some readers might find offensive</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Death Comes the Morning (unannounced and new)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Optimism Is Innate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5267633) by [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke). 
  * Inspired by [Optimism Is Innate](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5267633) by [keire_ke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke). 



The girl is maybe five or six, with dark reddish hair and eyes that look hollowed out, like shining beads of hematite in her head. Natasha thinks there's something familiar about her, but she can't quite place it, but she watches the girl's fingers, the reassuring gesture of pressing the thumb of her right hand to each finger, in turn, to calm herself as she mutters under her breath. Nine years old and she looks like she might vibrate out of her very skin with madness. Two of her fingers are wrapped in band-aids, stolen from the ruins of a ransacked CVS weeks before. All of the good stuff was gone, between howlers and looters, there was just things like half opened packets of band aids, broken bottles of olive oil and half-squeezed tubes of cinnamon flavored toothpaste. Nevertheless, Natasha swept everything she could into her rucksack. The child always has grass stains on her feet and her knees are black with muck, no matter how careful Natasha is when she bathes her, plucking the thumb of her left hand from the child's mouth in a familiar gesture. 

There had been an abandoned bear, stained and missing an eye, the fur wore down by love in places to mesh, in an old hotel room, ages before it felt like. Natasha took that too, plopping that into her lap with a smile, the girl tilted her head like a bird, a whole body gesture, before wrapping her arms around it and continuing to touch thumb to pinky, to ring finger, to middle finger, to index finger to palm and starting over, and over, and over, popping the other thumb into her mouth. They learned to take everything, what wasn't useful could be used in trade.

She sits in the back of their station wagon, repeating the gesture as she babbles in her gibberish pidgin of Sokovian and Polish. Without a better name to give her Natasha calls her Lisichka and answers well enough, as much as she does. If you put food in front of her she will eat it, in quick squirreling bites, she will drink, and she talks to the bear that she calls Pietro, and presses the finger of her right hand to each finger in turn. There are always grass stains on her feet.

The Asset doesn't talk. In all the time Natasha has known him, he hasn’t. He covers his face mostly with a scrap of black cloth, tucked into the high collar of the roll neck sweater they found in a hot topic, bright orange and ribbed, but soft to the touch and undamaged. The looters hadn't taken it, probably because of the colour, but Natasha doesn't care for such things. Colours can be changed, a warm sweater is something they can use.

Natasha sits in the passenger seat of their worn out station wagon, stolen from Boise on their journey when the car they before crapped out. It's easier to take new cars, abandoned on the road, than it is to fix what they have. The older models last longer.

It’s been years since Natasha felt attached to anything. She had loved to dance once, but she lost that years before the virus. She remembers her feet, twisted and sore and the Widow's matron repeating the lesson - broken bones heal stronger.

 

There is a cassette in the player, a copy of a pair of albums released before the virus, they play them over and over for noise other than their breathing. When the tape ends she pops it from the player, flips it and pushes it back in. Natasha wonders if it's the only thing keeping her sane, as she leans her head against the glass listening to the gibberish in the back seat, the slow steady breaths of the asset and sings along under her breath “ _What have I done, What lies I have told, I've played games with the ones that rescued my soul.”_

It’s a long drive to Westchester, the roads ruined and the infected littering the way. There is word that there is sanctuary there, a broken radio broadcast heard in South California telling them to make their way to Westchester to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, that there is safety there apart from the Infected and the Blood that hold the remnants of the cities. It should be safe there.

—-

The Sentinel virus was accidentally released in the winter of ‘86. Hydra collapsed in ‘91, after holding out for nearly five years. It took Natasha four years more to find the Asset. Ten years had allowed the virus to evolve, for civilisations to rise and fall.

Bolivar Trask worked for Hydra although he had not known it. Parts of Hydra were obsessed with the _Shashka_ , the so-called Mutants, and Trask was one of them. He developed a virus in the hope of destroying them totally. One of the Leviathan scientists thought that Trask's own children were _Shashka_ and that was why he hated them so fiercely, Natasha didn't know if it was true. He had created the Sentinel Virus in the early seventies and even Hydra had buried it.

Natasha learned that as she searched for the Asset.

There were five types of living infected. She had spent two months in a place where they called them Ghosts, the name worked as well as any other she supposed. Ten years was plenty of time for languages to change.

The virus killed most people straight away, but it wasn't true of everyone, some people changed.

The first type they called the Hunger, or the Feeder, this was the most common type. They ate, whatever it was they could get, and if they could not their bodies turned on themselves, devouring almost everything they didn't need to survive. Muscles became honed and elastic, bones thinned and set in longer lengths until they became horrific variations of human, with bulging eyes and teeth driven out at angles like the menhirs at Stonehenge, shattered into spikes and what hair they retained turning shock white. That virus had mutagenic properties and emaciation changed them. An old woman had called them wendigo but Natasha had thought of them as Feeders for so long that in her head that’s what she called them.

They were fast and nimble but strangely delicate and feral but stupid, they didn't break they shattered and burned like old kindling.

Then came the Sniffers, they had become almost bestial, hair or spikes growing over their body, thicker and stocky, their spines arching and their knuckles being used to propel them forward. They were easily scared but hunted in packs. There was speculation that they could see in the dark. They were opportunists who lurked in the deep woods.

Drowners lurked in lakes, their skin almost sloughed off by the water that they needed to keep their muscles moist, what they had sagged to form fins. They were blind, their sockets empty and their mouths flapping uselessly at rotten meat, the gums torn away to reveal the socketed bone.

Howlers were next. They almost looked human, fish-belly pale with pupils blown so there was no iris and nostrils slitted like a fish’s gills, their jaws dislocated and the skin of their necks mottled and dark. They loped like Sniffers but sometimes their prey made them raise their heads and howl in low deep tones. Then another would howl, and a third and so forth until there was no one left to hear, forming a choral wall of sound that brought every infected in hearing range to feed.

Clangers were the last, and the most dangerous. They didn't have the same strain but instead had the “ _En Sabah Nur_ ” variant. Natasha had seen it called the "Asset Variation". It was a techno-organic mutagen that slowly turned the organic matter in the bodies to a form of telekinetic metal, so when they moved their skin clanged like metal striking. Their eyes turned milk white and the metal moved in patches until it completely consumed the host if it could not feed or spread.

The same virus had been used in the Forties on the Asset, replacing his mangled and useless arm with one of living metal, but it seemed to burn his mind out when it did. Sometimes he seemed soft and sad as if he remembered. then he closed off again like it had never happened.

But the Clangers were relentless, once they scented prey they didn't stop until they had either fed or the virus overwhelmed them to the point that there was nothing left but metal.

Sometimes Natasha envied them, there was a calm in that sort of thing, hunger and death didn't mean anything to them, it was that simple in their world, hunger, hunt, death. Even Lisichka’s madness couldn't threaten that easy peace. Instead Natasha had to do the thinking for the three of them even as she wondered how Lisichka always had grass stains on her bare feet.

—-

There was a stiff breeze ruffling the high grass of the plain as they drove past. Even Natasha had bored of the tape's endless repetition and had popped it out halfway through a song, slow and sweet like molasses about the soft rains of April. She has her legs up on the dashboard, wearing sneakers with the toes stuffed with newspapers because she couldn't find a pair that fit when the last pair died of overuse. Her jeans were hemmed with battlefield sutures made of fishing twine, and the dress that Lisichka was wearing was a man's sweater, with the collar and cuffs torn away and belted with the sleeve of another shirt. It had been a hideous pattern, bold jewel bright violet with hot pink camellias. She would only let the asset brush her hair, pulling the comb, with it's broken teeth, through her hair and humming tunelessly under his breath. He would brush it over and over until it shone like polished silk.

But when they found themselves places to sleep as they traveled it was Natasha that Lisichka would crawl into bed with, curling up against her warmth, carving a space for herself with dirty knees and sharp little elbows as the Asset keeps watch. He didn't seem to need nearly as much sleep. Lisichka never woke up when Natasha did to the pop-pop-pop of the Asset removing an infected in the dark where they lurked like ghosts.

Feeders made a noise like milk poured over rice crispies when they burned, a persistent snap crackle pop like salt in a fireplace. It wasn't unusual to dream of it, to wake to the smell of burned jerky in her nostrils. Or the cold low howl in the night. They always howled for Lisichka.

Wisconsin was quiet, with a herd of buffalo stood in the grass near the side of the road, ten years without mankind and nothing to stop them and nature was coming back. The Infected were growing fewer and fewer with every year and the animals were coming back.

In her backpack was a data file, all of the information Leviathan had on the virus and the Infected, their records from the Red Room, all of it encoded in microdots looking like a battered copy of the novel _"I am Legend_ " by Richard Matheson. Each period holding as much information as they could compile. The irony is not lost on Natasha. Sometimes she reads it to Lisichka, practicing the flat midwestern vowels of whatever state they are driving through.

Often they sleep in the car, with the Asset perched on the roof with a rifle so it's safe, and by the light of a tallow candle, rendered down from whatever oil they can find, fat most often in a coloured jar on the dash, smoky and foul smelling the close confines of the car with the window cracked a notch as she reads. There was a time when she was responsible for the world, for Leviathan and Hydra, she altered the world in her image and now the only thing she’s responsible for is a little girl curled around her and making sure no matter what they lose they bring the book to Westchester.

Yet when she dreams she dreams of dancing but the music of Tchaikovsky and Karetnikov is replaced by the steady keyboards and unearthly vocals. Her reflection in the mirror wall is the asset in full regalia - long lost and the lines " _And in the mirror stands half a man I thought no one could break"_ linger like the heavy smell of the tallow candle in her hair.

—-

Outside Manitowoc Natasha fucked a man for a night's food and shelter for her and Lisichka. The next morning he offered her sanctuary in a kind voice then grabbed her arm when she went to leave- making crude comments about her and looking at Lisichka with a gaze so hungry that Natasha did not know if he wanted to fuck or eat her. It didn't matter; the Asset dropped from the roof of his tiny cabin, put his hands on both sides of the man's head and snapped his neck like kindling. With a low cry Lisichka ran into Natasha's arms, and together they went back into the cabin.

The Asset had reacted before Natasha could.

Natasha wondered if she had lost her edge.

Then she washed up the plates from the oatmeal they had eaten that morning in water warmed over the wood burning stove as the Asset removed the body before it drew the Infected.

The luxury of washing the night before in warm water had almost hurt: Lying in a bed, curled up with Lisichka nearly brought her to tears. The Asset was stripping the place of anything of use, food stores, rabbit and bear dried to jerky, venison steaks air cured, and the best part of a boar hung in the fireplace to smoke. There were blankets, thick quilts that had clearly been made with love, and Natasha wondered if this cabin had belonged to the dead man or he had just taken it and kept it like he had wanted to keep her. Stuffed away in a drawer, amidst paraffin wax candles was a small ornament, a stone cottage with thatched roof probably set in resin but there was something about the weight of it in her hand that reassured Natasha and she thought, I finally have my own home and the dark joke made her laugh until her sides hurt and Lisichka was dancing around her, sharing her glee in her own reality by leaping up and down and making happy yells until Natasha got up and danced with her, her little bare feet slapping on the wooden floor.

She remembers the refrain, over and over in her head. Broken bones heal stronger. It doesn't matter that she breaks - only that she heals stronger. Broken bones heal stronger.

The next day Natasha wakes up in a dream to find the Asset sitting with Lisichka on his knee, telling her tales in Russian of Ivan Tsarevich and the Koschei, but something about his stories sounds like the tales of Captain America fighting the Red Skull. Lisichka laughs when she should and makes noises of awe when she should, almost like she understands but she doesn't speak English or Russian, when she communicates it's in a mash of broken Polish and Sokovian. She seems to like it when they read to her though. She grew up in a Hydra facility, her files heavily redacted, perhaps these are the first times someone has told her stories.

Natasha grew up in the Red Room. She knows how terribly Hydra treats children. They taught her ballet for flexibility, yoga for reach, pilates for definition, aikido, judo, hapkido and krav maga. They taught her to play the piano when the other girls danced, her form perfectly still as she danced en pointe in her head. She had loved dancing. When she started to fight it was just another form of dancing. She took the time during a mission in Brazil to learn capoeira because it was just so beautiful, blades in her shoes turned the movements into a Danse Macabre. Her handlers called her a dervish of death and she had been proud.

Leviathan was not Hydra but they had not been kind. Kindness was for the weak. Over and over they repeated the legend"broken bones heal stronger" so they broke her bones, again and again, forced her to punch oak wrapped in leather until her knuckles were so much dust. They snapped her limbs, all of them at the same time so the healing time was reduced. They sterilized her before her first menstruation. They kept her hair shorn to her head.

These were lessons they learned for the years they trained the Black Widows as they called them. She wasn't the Black Widow. She was a Black Widow. Lisichka wouldn't be one, what remained of Hydra would want her, Natasha wouldn't let that happen.

So they loaded the car with whatever the house had to offer into the station wagon, loading up the trunk as much as they could, strapping more to the roof like a family on a road trip, bottles of grain liquor to power the ethanol converter that fueled the car driving south into Illinois because the roadblocks and Infected had driven them north into Wisconsin. For a moment Natasha debated burning down the cabin, then she decided not to. If Westchester was a bust it was a safe-house, but as they drove back to the main highway the howls sounded, low and deep carrying on the wind. Primitive echo location that was no less accurate for the eerie nature of it. There was a beauty in a wolf’s howl. These sounded like the moans of the damned.

The Asset didn't even stir in the passenger seat as she drove, the pop pop of the gravel under the wheels sounding like the sound of the asset’s sniper rifle in the dark.

\---

Natasha kills three Drowners on the shores of Lake Eyrie, smashing the head of one in against a rock. She stands knee-deep in the waters of the lake, the water sharp as knives through the tears in her jeans, ignoring the slashes on her skin. The skin of the drowners pulls away in her hands. She heard that they took the skin of their victims and wore it draped over their own meat. It makes them hard to grab, but they make a noise, a terrible neckering that she won't easily forget.

They moved towards Lisichka like homing missiles and the Asset hunting for food, why did they come so near the water? why did Lisichka want to see the waves? they came for her and Natasha put her down, then pulled herself out of the water with every bone aching and slashes through the fabric of her jeans and sweater, looking down at herself with a goddammit because they didn't have the clothes to spare.

She pulled the remaining skin from her fingernails with the point of a piece of wood that the Asset had been using as a toothpick, then throwing it out of the window of the station wagon as they trundled along and the man on the cassette sang " _My blood's sweet with pain the wind and the rain bring back words of a song and they say wave goodbye."_

She strips to the skin at the back of the station wagon, pulling on what clean clothes that she has. They are going to have to risk the city, she thinks, so many of their basic things are running out. She might be able to get Lisichka shoes that fit, a new comb with almost all of its teeth. She salivates at the idea of actual toothpaste, not just chewing a willow branch and rubbing her teeth down with cloth dipped in salt.

The Houses hold the major cities but she doesn't remember which one holds Chicago. The twelve Houses rose when everything else fell, rising to the top like scum, but they keep their cattle safe because they need to feed. They have their weaknesses, but immunity to the virus in all it's forms served them much better than the humans they fed on.

Come nightfall when the Howlers and Clangers press the walls and deadman’s land which had been the suburbs the Houses came out to play, enjoying the slaughter. It covers their mistakes, those who were turned by mistake torn apart by the Infected and those who are Chosen.

Hydra had never trusted the Houses, but Natasha knew she and the Asset had nothing to fear from them. She remembered the last time she met one of their Elders: how he had looked her up and down and muttered how there was nothing worse than good blood gone bad.

A second cassette had turned up in the cabin in Manitowoc, part of a Linguaphone set teaching Italian, but the sound of the woman’s voice is different, a variation from the man and his tragically upbeat songs. Natasha wonders how much it's worth. The idea of parting with the music is more than she can bear.

She swallows it down with the lesson: Broken bones heal stronger.

In her dreams it is what the _wilis_ dance to in their white dresses, back and forth and back and forth, circling in pairs almost in slow motion, step, stretch and then into waves that move so slowly, bending to the prima, almost in synch as they dance and dance and fall. She doesn't remember what the _wilis_ are or which ballet they belong to, because in her head they dance and the voice sings _"the soft rains of April are over."_

\---

The House of Erebus holds Illinois, or at least what remains of it. Their patriarch lives in what used to be the Art Institute of Chicago because the Blood love nothing as much as pleasure. They surround themselves with beautiful things. Everything of beauty and pleasure has been stripped from the city, fine fabrics, precious gems. If one of the uninfected has a talent they are given pride of place like a pampered toy, always aware that’s what they are. The more valuable the talent the less likely they are to become food.

Deacon Frost is a tall pale Blood with a scar above his left ash coloured eye that bisects the brow, his mouth is thin, almost lipless and he has perhaps a day's stubble. He is beautiful in the way that dangerous things always are. He sits in the back of his limousine, to collect them from the gate to Chicago. As he talks his teeth are small and sharp, a hint that he is not human- not any more. He is as changed as the infected. His suit is perfectly tailored and pressed, a silk wool blend that would have been extravagant for the upper echelons of Leviathan. His shoes are perfectly polished, like he is a lawyer on Wall Street that was instead of a high ranked Blood in a ruined city in the apocalypse America became following the infection. He leans back, thighs apart in a comfortable sprawl as he contemplates what he will say, speaking in a low soft voice. Like everything about him it is a thing of violence restrained.

The Asset has Lisichka on his knee, his arm around her waist as she plays with his hair, almost long enough to braid now. She babbles in her nonsense variant of Polish and Sokovian as she twines his hair, dark and tangled, about her fingers. Through the glass Natasha can see the ruins of Chicago. The Blood have carved out space for themselves, clearing the roads they need, allowing for housing and places for vegetables to grow. Anything with no use is discarded to build the walls that protect the city. The Infected are put down like animals or thrown outside the walls where the Blood get to tear them apart for sport.

Even now when the wind shifts she can hear them howling. Their screams hang on the air. When she hears them she checks with the Asset, if he doesn't react she decides they're hallucinations, expectations. Lisichka reaches out and pats Natasha’s cheek like she's a baby. “Ojciec," she says, it’s a complete word but it's not the right word. Natasha feels like there should be a sticky film left behind, but there isn't. So many things about Lisichka don't make sense like the grass stains on her feet.

There are baths where human thralls- tattooed and haunted- rub her skin down with wet hessian before applying perfumed oils, wiping away the excess. The thralls bring a gown, heavy taffeta in layers the colour of old blood and sable, corsetted around her waist with a high cravat and lace cuffs at the elbows, finished with black satin gloves. The main dress is black, with a dark burgundy jumper and the black corset cinching it in. They give her a cuff of diamonds, each as long as her pinky, and draw her hair up under a jeweled comb. Her make up is like that of a doll, her face made paler, a swipe of gray at each eye and dark red at her lips, so she looks like one of the Blood who has just fed.

When Lisichka is brought in she has been washed and dressed, her face is red from screaming and her fingers are set. She is wearing a silk dress better suited to a Russian princess than a _Shashak_ deep in Blood territory when the world has died. She’s wearing a sarafan with shell sleeves and a kokoshnik, all of it in gold and trimmed in dark red. There are pretty little Mary Jane shoes on her feet that she's trying to kick off even as Natasha watches but all she manages is to pull down her pantyhose. Natasha can’t stop herself from rushing across the room and sweeping her off her feet muttering to her _"oya lyubimaya devushka_ " as if Lisichka can understand.

Lisichka just pats her cheek and then wriggles to be let down, making a disgruntled huff as she straightens her dress, the white ribbon of the kokoshnik hanging down her back like the wings of a dove, breaking the line of embroidered anemones along her shoulder bones that remind Natasha of nothing so much as blood spatters. Even with gloves and jewelry she presses fingers to thumb over and over, unaware she is even doing it, but, for once, her thumb isn't tucked into her mouth.

The Head of House Erebus has skin like waxy marble or a fine blue cheese, velvet and silk are draped around his shoulders in a loose robe with a black fur collar. He is wearing black leather gauntlets that make the long white stretch of his fingers more pronounced. His ears are pointed and his eyes dark sparkles under folds of cheese coloured skin, only his fangs remain in his mouth and his tongue is pale when it darts out to lick his thin blue lips. He is among the very old and moves slowly, with a sound like shifting sand. He is drinking from a goblet that might have been in the museum, it leaves a stain on his lips. When he speaks it sounds like steel dragged through gravel. He talks to her in Russian. "Natalya Vyacheslavovna Romanova, it has been a very long time."

The gesture she makes is a genuflection as she was trained to behave in churches. She answers as if she is speaking to an emperor. For the first time since Hydra fell she is scared. He has a permanence that terrifies her, but at her side Lisichka is fearless, singing a happy song about what sounds like saucepans. The Asset stands in the corner, in a turned out tuxedo with pleated white shirt and black bow tie, his hair has been cut short around his head but a kamen is tucked around his face. He watches the Blood with the same measured intent that he watched Frost, but they need help. This is not a sanctuary. This is merely a waypoint on the way to Westchester. She can live with this pomp, but she remembers what they called her "good blood gone bad" and wonders if the thralls got the grass stains from Lisichka's feet.

She can drink their champagne. She can move through their politics. It is merely a stop on the way. They laugh about Westchester when she mentions it is their goal. They try to taunt the Asset. If he acts against them in violence then the law of hospitality among them no longer applies and they will tear him apart- just because they can. They talk of someone called Stephen, they talk of the _Krasnyy Cherep_ and Zola. They push and they push but he does not react. They do not realize how they burned the rest of it out of him. She tried to call him by name, or what she believed his name to be - he did not react. He is the Asset; it's all he chooses to be.

It is Frost who asks her what she wants: that dares ask why they will risk this. She knows that they cannot feed from her, Hydra and Leviathan had been working with the Blood for years, they had long since created something to make their blood unpalatable. Even Lisichka carries the thing that makes her blood taste bad. She can't offer the child so Frost wonders what she can offer, she can see it in his eyes, in his stance. They can't keep her, the stories of the Widows precede her. She knows that the Blood captured her sisters, she knows about the slaughters that followed, the tragedies and losses on both sides. Hydra and the Blood kept a wary distance from each other, but every now and again their paths crossed, coming together like the _wilis_ in Natasha's dream.

The Asset catches her eyes and crosses over to meet them. "I can offer you something priceless," she says and takes his hand, she tugs away the white glove to reveal the metal hand underneath.

"He is Infected?" Frost asks.

"No," Natasha corrects, "he is _the_ Infected, how much can I get for a vial from patient zero for your experiments?"

She can practically see him salivate. "You would make a glorious vampire." He tells her. She accepts it like the compliment he intends it to be.

They will leave come the dawn and the Blood knows it, but it offers her something. Adult conversation about anything, food, real food, not scavenged from cans, canned peaches and pears and beans with mini franks for added protein. Natasha is not too proud to admit she almost cried when she found the hen in Oregon, sat on her eggs, and it took all of her Widow skills to sneak into that farm and take them without alerting the dogs. They would have shot her for them. She wouldn't have blamed them.

Her journey has gone up along the Pacific coast, along what used to be the Canadian border, where the expanses are and it’s easier to avoid large settlements and the worst of the road blocks and abandoned cars. She has scavenged carrots, too early in the season and forced them down with as much dirt as the vegetable. She has lain in the back of the station wagon clutching her stomach after learning what was not safe to eat, but better her than Lisichka. She remembers chocolate truffles and when they leave, when Frost presses a paper bag of peppermint ribbons into her hand she questions it. It is an uncharacteristic act of kindness. She wonders what it will cost her.

"For the child," he says, "we can't seem to get rid of them," he adds, "I think they’re breeding," and Natasha doesn't clutch the bag to her chest, she doesn’t. She says nothing, her throat thick with it, before the asset takes them, puts them in the glovebox with the copy of _"I am Legend"_. "You will have a place here, Widow," he adds, "there is always a place for those of use." She supposes it's true, but later she tries to scrub the feel of his fingers from her cheek until the skin is red and raw.

\---

Natasha loses her mind outside the ruins of Columbus. She wakes up in the front seat of a car she does not recognise, the Asset driving, dried apple sauce around her mouth. The cassette is playing but the volume is turned down. She knows she’s missing several days, her clothes are changed, and her hair is braided, tighter than she normally wears it. "Thank you." She says to the Asset, she pats her hand against his thigh and sets her head against the glass. He doesn't react, hands at ten and two on the wheel, the road a mess of potholes as they drive and Lisichka chattering in the back to her balding bear. She calls it Pietro.

Through the trees Natasha imagines she can see the burning white eyes of the Ferals as they watch them go.

She pops the cassette from the player, cracks open the window and appreciates the quiet.

She wonders how long she lost, how long the Asset took care of both of them? She imagines him leading her, catatonic, to the privy he dug, wiping her ass with his metal arm and she starts to laugh, but it’s lost its energy. She's so tired it hurts.

She lets herself dream of the cabin in Manitowoc, of its rugs and quilts, of its small wood stove, and it's bath, dragged in when she wants to bathe, and the water used to wash the floors when she’s done. She fantasizes of the smoke house and the wild meat she can hunt. A home, safe from the Infected with the Asset, with Lisichka growing there, safe and coddled in her crazy.

Westchester she reminds herself. There is a sanctuary there. They forgive you there, she tells herself, it's a sanctuary where all your sins can be forgiven. There is a place there for Lisichka, then she and the Asset can return to Manitowoc. Westchester can take the burden of the book. They can search for a cure, a vaccine, whatever. She is Hydra, she is a Widow. She cannot be infected. She's been bitten several times over, there is a place on her thigh where the scar took almost a year to heal before it returned to the perfect state Hydra wanted of it. Scars would ruin her ability to seduce, but the people she needed to seduce are gone.

What does a spy do when the world she watched is gone? When the people she watched it for are gone?

\---

The Asset leaves her just outside a town that calls itself the white rose city, it's name gone on the sign. There is a house, separate from the others, old colonial in style, the shutters nailed fast but painted a dove grey. The inside of the house is exactly as it was left, until the Asset scaled the wall to climb in through the single unshuttered window in the attic. The furniture is covered in dust sheets, as if the people who lived here thought that they might just return. There is a doll’s house in one of the bedrooms, with a pink princess bed with canopy and unicorn toys, that Lisichka runs to with a delighted squeal.

There are pretty clothes in the dresser for her, brightly colored yoga pants and long tee shirts with frills and matching striped sleeves. The colors are garish and advertise rainbow bright and the juxtapositions hurt Natasha's eyes and she’s secretly glad Lisichka doesn't care for them. There are women's suits of fine fabric and neatly pressed slacks. The sewing kit is designed for quilting but the tiny needles are sharp against her fingers when she tests them. There is even a pair of tiny scissors. This house is richer than the mines of King Solomon.

She isn't there when the Asset goes, he takes the clock on the mantel, turns the dial so it cycles around six times, and then places it back, before going to Natasha, cupping his metal hand around her neck and presses his forehead to hers. It's the only assurance she has he's coming back. She spends the first hour exploring the house. She finds the former owners in the garage, piled into the car with a hose leading to the window. She looks around for anything that can be scavenged, throws the hand tools into a canvas bag she found under one of the beds, then closes and locks the door behind her. It's the only peace she can offer them.

The dead are gone, but Lisichka is hungry, and there is canned food in her bag, none in the immaculate kitchen. She opens up a tin of pears pouring them out into a bowl with a rose petal pattern on the china. The spoon is silver. Natasha idly wonders if it still has value. Lovely things can be traded to the Blood. Metals traded to smaller farmsteads that have gathered around, melted down to make useful things, but silver is soft, but it's powerful against the Blood. She never used to care for these things, Leviathan sent her out and equipped her for what she needed. She misses the ease of it. She misses the ease of knowing what she was and what she was meant to do, and if she wavered, if she questioned, she knew that they knew better than she.

Now there is Lisichka and canned pears and the dance of the _wilis_ that goes on behind her eyes to the songs she has played so often they've replaced whatever other music she felt that she knew.

She curls up in one of the cushioned chairs with blankets draped over them, crocheted squares that are worn soft with use, and a fire in the grate, with water boiled in a copper pan and handfuls of rice. The tin of condensed milk was a welcome find, shaken and then left upside down for a whole day in case it had separated but it would distract Lisichka from the Asset’s absence, but after they've eaten, a rudimentary rice porridge with canned fruit and condensed milk she gathered the child unto her knee, wearing one of the loose flowery skirts she found in the wardrobe and tell her stories. She tells her about the _wilis_ and the way they dance.

As she talks she remembers the story, or thinks she does - maybe she makes it up, of the girl who died of broken heart after being left behind, and how the _wilis_ called to her from beyond the grave to join them so they might destroy the one who wronged her, but she can't remember the end, so she makes one up. She’s not sure that Lisichka understands but there is a peace sitting there in the stuffed chair with the blankets close about and the child on her lap, a stolen Barbie doll, and her balding bear in her arms as she plays with Natasha's hair, twining it through her fingers, and Natasha wonders why she has grass stains on the soles of her feet.

As Lisichka sleeps in Natasha's arms she half-remembers a fairy tale of girls who died on their wedding day, and how they changed, became vampires who haunted the places where they died, but the details were gone, but they were called the "polden' nevesty" but she doesn't remember why.

The next day, with food in the pantry and security as they wait for the Asset, Natasha plays, she finds a cotton broomstick skirt, perhaps a left over from the woman who lived here's life before she married, and she puts it on, with silky smooth pantyhose after she used her knife to shave her legs, just to appreciate the feel of the nylon against her skin, rubbed down after with magnolia-scented body lotion she found in a drawer. She sat in the bath with Lisichka, the furnace that heated the house heating the water from the well, asking where the grass stains come from as she washes her feet with lavender scented soap, still in it's paper wrapper, and a whole bath salt cube. It was funny how such small things were so luxurious when only weeks before there had been walk in baths and expensive perfumes and slaves to wash her.

Dressed and preened, a little drunk from the gin she found under the sink she pushes back the chairs to clear the room and using the mirror over the mantle and the mantle itself as a barre she starts her warm up. She spends nearly an hour stretching and reaching, bending in time to imaginary music before she starts to dance. She’s almost completed the motion when she sees Lisichka watching and clapping and Natasha smiles, and moves across to the girl, offering her hands to dance with her, eventually lifting her to rest on her hip to continue to dance with her to the music in her head.

\---

The Asset returns like he promised after three days with a basket of fresh apples, a little bruised but not preserved and Natasha eats them until her stomach hurts. There are other things in the back of the Toyota flatbed they are driving now, a box of carrots and potatoes. Lisichka runs to him with a delighted scream ignoring the blood and gore in his hair and how his arm is shown completely without fabric. She can't ask him what it is that he did - he hasn't spoken in all the time she's been with him.

She’s heard it called all manner of things, she calls it mutism and leaves it at that. He is silent, but she can gather most of what he says from gestures and his eyebrows. She’s had whole arguments with his eyebrows and lost.

They will find their way to Westchester, but now there is food, fresh food, not just tinned fruit and beans and franks and rats roasted on sticks. She knows some survivors have turned to cannibalism, she is not one of them. The Asset does not react to those well.

They will get to Westchester.

They will.

Failure is not an option.

Broken bones heal stronger.

**Author's Note:**

> the idea of them travelling to a place that might not exist intrigues me and that Hydra would have messed with their assets, and how their assets would be best placed to survive this sort of thing - but not well = that delights me  
> I'm evil, I admit it
> 
> All of the songs are from the same album, A-ha's Scoundrel Days 
> 
> Wanda is Lisichka which is Russian for fox kit, Natasha also calls her a beautiful girl and talks about the Red Skull using the Russian words.


End file.
